Saturday, August 16, 2008

A day to bury bad news

This is a pretty coruscating attack on the rationale behind plans to reduce the drink-drive limit in the UK. (Warning: swearing alert!)

Why should we adopt the laws of countries that, despite a nominally lower legal threshold, still in practice have more drink-related road deaths?

In particular, this comment from a coroner stands out:

“Of those fatal accidents where alcohol is implicated, it has been on very rare occasions, and I have been doing this job for 17 years, that I have come across inquests where people have been killed with a blood alcohol level of between 50 and 80mgs. Normally, the blood alcohol level involved in these deaths is between 150 and 350 mgs.”

This underlines the point that the vast majority of accidents attributed to alcohol involve people who are by any standards drunk, not those marginally above or even below the current legal limit.